Mumme Poll

“I always tell people that if they don’t like the way I vote, they can rank teams how they please. Thanks to you, they can.” – Sports Illustrated’s Andy Staples

INTRODUCTION

The Mumme Poll is an ongoing experiment to construct a viable method to rank the best Division-1/FBS college football teams, absent the bias and potential conflicts of interest that affect other polls, in particular the USA Today Coaches Poll. The poll is jointly sponsored by two college football blogs, Get The Picture and 3rd Saturday in Blogtober.

We attempt to accomplish this by conducting the voting in two very different ways from other football polls:

The first vote does not take place until after the games of Week Six have been played. Voters are not asked to evaluate teams based on preseason expectations and are not expected to use those as a baseline from which to rank teams for the rest of the year.

Rather than being required to rank twenty five D-1 teams in order of preference, Mumme Poll voters submit ballots which consist of their top ten teams in the country, without ranking (other than to designate a single best from those ten, for use as a tiebreaker). The poll rankings are then compiled by means of approval voting; that is, the teams are ranked in the order of the total number of times they appear on voters’ ballots. (For more on approval voting as a means of addressing bias in the Coaches’ Poll, see this post.)

BACKGROUND/HISTORY

The inspiration for the Mumme Poll came from the final 2007 regular season Coaches Poll and Tony Barnhart’s post breaking down some of the more curious ballots cast. (You can read that post here.) The poll is named in honor of perhaps the most questionable vote of that Coaches Poll – Hal Mumme’s ballot listing Hawaii as the number one team in the country.

In response, the initial Mumme Poll ran at Get The Picture for the 2008 season. (Florida finished first at season’s end.) With the 2009 season, the poll moved to a new home at this site. The move allowed for a web interface that made the voting process much more user friendly. For 2010, the site was tweaked in order to allow for greater feedback from voters.

PARTICIPATION

We’re (small “d”) democrats here. Mumme Poll voting is open to any knowledgeable, enthusiastic college football fan. That’s part of the fun of it.

RULES

There aren’t many, but what few there are matter.

Registration. To cast a ballot, you’ll need to register at the Mumme Poll site. Registration each season is limited to the week leading up to and through the games of week five.

Voting period. In most weeks, balloting takes place at any time between 9:00 A.M. on the Sunday following the games and 9:00 P.M. on the following Monday. On those rare weeks when a Sunday game is played, the voting is pushed back 24 hours.

Ballot format. A ballot must contain votes for ten schools and a top team selected from those schools.

The one commandment.Don’t try to game the system. Don’t subvert the vote by submitting a ballot with your favorite school and the nine worst teams in D-1, for example. The ballots are monitored and if something questionable comes up, a voter will be given a chance to explain. If we’re convinced there’s a deliberate effort to muck things up, we’ll toss the ballot and the voter.

I’m not sure how many others want to go to the trouble of managing a poll. If you watch what Brian Cook goes through in running the BlogPoll, it’s a little intimidating. Although I do think the Mumme Poll will be a good bit easier to manage due to its structure.

In one sense I agree with your point about conducting the voting on a broader scale. The fact that the vast majority of folks voting here are Georgia fans is something I’ll want to monitor carefully. On the other hand, if the point of approval voting is to reduce the element of bias in the results, maybe it’s a good thing to see how the voting plays out with that sort of a group.

I would love to participate in the Mumme Poll. However I have one potential conflict with voting after week 10. The wife is making a strong push to take the kids to Jacksonville and “swing” by Disney Land/World (which ever is in Orlando) the Sunday and Monday after the game. And you know what they say – Happy Wife = Happy Life. Anyway I generally don’t like taking laptops or blackberry’s on trips because work never fails to interfere somehow. So it’s very doubtful I will be able to submit a vote by the deadline that week. If this disqualifies me from participating that’s fine, I’ll understand and somehow move on.

oops…non-championship game conferences (once again) if voting does continue?

That’s one of the things I hate about the polls now, You are punished for losing every week, but a loss later in the season ends up hurting your team more in the end, even if your first (or second) loss is in a hard-fought championship game.

I would love to participate in this poll. I’m an avid college football fan and from what I read about this poll or experiment, it seams very fair. I’m also a HUGE Dawg fan but I promise not to let that get in the way of my judgement. I also enjoy reading “Get the Picture” on a fairly regular basis. Great name for a blog!!

Check out whobeat.net, a win-based seeding process for D-1A football. All 120 teams start out at #1. The only data utilized for positioning is the “W”. Teams create the data/outcomes and thusly position themselves based on each team’s success against their respective schedules . This process is purely about the “W” and establishing values for head-to-head victories. The info at whobeat.net is the kind of info needed by anyone participating in a vote-based football poll such as the Mumme–I want to play too! OK?

If I understand you correctly, Clay, you’re saying that a true approval vote would allow every person casting a ballot to decide how many teams to populate it with, from one to one hundred twenty-four (or whatever the current number of D-1 teams is).

Under that scenario, what’s to stop a group of voters from conspiring to cast ballots with a single vote of the same team on them all?

I understand that in the context of a general election, with thousands or even millions of voters. But in the context of a Coaches Poll, with only sixty voters, it sure seems like it would be easy to game the results with such a strategy.

On the contrary, with a small group of voters, the difference between a sincere vote (mean-based thresholding) and a strategic vote generally becomes smaller. (Incidentally, this is also why the optimal Score Voting strategy in small groups is often not to vote in exaggerated Approval Voting style: http://scorevoting.net/RVstrat1.html)

Think about it. Say you bullet vote for “Nader”, only to find that “Bush” squeaks by to beat “Gore”. Now you’ll be kicking yourself for not also approving of Gore. That “spoiler” problem doesn’t go away just because you have a small number of voters. Indeed, it can be worse.

The irony is that by limiting the number of votes, you encourage the kind of strategic voting that says “vote for Gore even if you prefer Nader, so you don’t get Bush”. I.e. your favorite team is one you believe isn’t well liked by other voters anyway, and so you might as well use your limited votes on teams where you’re more likely to make a difference. The very strength of approval voting is that it gives you unlimited votes.

At the very least, a rule change that says you must vote for at least N teams is an improvement. But even then, N (apparently 10, in your case) is some arbitrary number you chose with presumably no scientific basis for it.

And speaking of science, one important criterion for a voting method to satisfy is “symmetry”. In other words, for any vote that can be cast, there’s an “equal but opposite” vote that can be cast to cancel that vote. The idea is that two voters with the exact opposite preferences should have equal weight, and thus cancel out. So if one voter votes for precisely 10 teams, then a voter with the exact opposite preferences would logically vote for every other team aside from those 10. But your system doesn’t allow that. This introduces noise or “loss” into the system.